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Tuesday, March 20, 2012

So all along our journey in getting to having Clifford on the insulin pump I pictured a jump back to diagnosis time when he first started. And in a sense it is. There is so much new things to learn, tweaking like crazy to his ratios and basals that will go on these first few weeks to a month after starting on insulin. As we move forward and are one day out to going live on insulin, I am not as nervous as I thought I would be. I have become comfortable with the features of the pump that I've been taught. In addition I've gone and done additional training and courses that Medtronic offers online. It's really quite nice how they have their education site set up with practice quizzes at the end. I think their training process on the site has made me much more comfortable with everything.

Now one day before I have to make sure all information is ready to go when we leave bright and early at the crack of dawn tomorrow. This includes a 3 day log or diet sheets of what he is eating to get an idea of how many carbs a day he has. I'm not really sure what the average is for kids his age but Clifford's average has been between 218 and 270 grams a day. And the funny thing about that all is it might seem like a crazy amount. However if you were to review his sheet you'd see he eats a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables. He is following a gluten free diet for the most part and eats really healthy. I kept thinking the doctors and educators may look at his sheets and say "um yeah sure this is what you are feeding him". In addition to these sheets I've made sure to have an updated DMMP (Diabetes Medical Management Plan) printed out, filled out, signed, and ready to go for our endo's signature for the school now that he is on the pump. That is one thing to remember if you are moving forward from MDI's to the pump, make sure your DMMP, is updated to include your pumping information. Tonight I will be reviewing some more information, and uploading his numbers for the past few days that we've been on the pump to carelink, and printing out our charts just to have because you never know. Clifford is excited that today will be his last day at school where he gets injections, it's like a new normal, or life is starting to unfold for him and he's ready. We've already experienced one bad site change due to the site not sticking properly and locking in place. So now he understands that not all the time will it go perfectly.

He got as brave today as to go in and lock his pump on his own. Then I asked what he was doing, he goes "I've seen you do it all the time so I locked it". That boy, he is smart and will pick up on it very easily. However I've told him to give it some time before he starts wanting to press buttons while we're on insulin so we all get used to it and in time he can start bolusing himself too. So tomorrow or Thursday depending on what time we get home. I am hoping to have an updated picture and our pump story about going live on insulin and moving forward to our new normal.